In a way, she had tried to kill him, hoped he would kill himself, as she projected more than once, needing to sell the drama and remove him permanently. Spoiled, arrogant, and vindictive … everything was about her. She had not told them that he had done exactly what she wanted … left her alone, let her off the hook from having to pretend she was his friend. She had not told them that she couldn’t stand it when he did, that she needed the control, nor that she had refused to leave him be and, finally, accosted him for it. And, what she did say, she revised in such a way as to make herself the poor, innocent, victim, when she had become the aggressor. He had let her go, but everything had to be her way. She told herself she was being kind. She had been anything but kind. 

She did not tell them how she had rewritten history, how she had claimed things that had never happened and altered her reactions to what had. In short, she had lied up a storm to get her way. And though it became a neverending hardship, he had not been bothered by having to stand for what he had done in response, the parts he should not have. What bothered him, ate at him, was what she had done but denied. That she simply got away with it, because everyone treated her like a child. And her lies, her utter unwillingness to admit to them. It was as low, cowardly, and degenerate as she continued to paint him … sociopathic and narcissistic, as she continued to mock him to her friends, to label him crazy. It was a mystery as to whether it was real narcissism or just her acting like the pigs she had given herself to, but she would have been wise to read up on the subject and note her own behavior. She would not. She never did anything wrong, imagining herself above him, so mature, so pragmatic … She was none of that. 

All he’d wanted to do was love her. All she’d wanted to do was play victim. And she was one, but not his. She was a victim of her own need for attention, her inability to make her own choices, her learned arrogance, and her own dishonesty, which she would never admit, even to have something real. He’d offered her that much, if nothing else, but she wanted to play a role in a depressingly mundane fantasy she’d been given, one with no truth to it at all, preferring the ruse of love and loyalty, based upon possession, than the real thing. 

But he fell on his sword for her again anyway, let her go, and, in that way he did die for her, did kill himself. And she could not have cared less. He would choose to spend his final years alone, untrusting of everyone—ostracized, glared at, based upon her invented stories. While she, without remorse or conscience, would continue her life as if nothing had happened, pursuing the basest of false men with her phony smile, lost in the materialism she had projected onto him, and denying any guilt on her own part. He would live life in the dark, with a pure heart, while she would bathe in artificial light, surrounded by those she misled, her heart a shriveled black organ of dishonesty and using. She had committed murder but pinned it on the the one whom she killed, and she hid the body behind a locked door, acting innocent and following the wrongly offered advice from those around her that she should never open it again. She was guilty, but she had no problem living with her guilt, misleading everyone around her and everyone in her future. In her mind, any slight against her, no matter how small, how ultimately stupid and harmless, how justifiable, or how spurred by her own actions, negated any culpability on her part. That’s who she was. That is how she planned to leave it, and that is how he would leave it. She didn’t have to be, but she wanted to be despised by him. So she was.